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How the Enlightenment made Christian belief impossible

By Peter Sellick - posted Tuesday, 19 August 2003


We are used to reading about the decline of the church; with glee from secular commentators who think we would be better off without religion and with sadness, even despair, from those in the church. The church growth movement arose in response to this decline and represents a new thing in the history of the church.

Never before could it be imagined that the church could be or needed to be managed into health. Was not the life of the church the work of the Holy Spirit? It was thought that if we reformed the ancient liturgy the people would come, we did but they didn't. It was thought that if we ordained women, people who saw the church as a boys club would come. We did, but they didn't. This sort of analysis was applied to music, Christian education, and congregational attitude. If the church were friendlier, easier to join, and reduced the emphasis on doctrine in an attempt to be where the people were, then they will surely come. They did not. Liberal Protestants stopped saying the creed, de-emphasised the brokenness of humankind and took up the insights of popular psychology. Still they did not come.

All of these attempts to resuscitate the church ignored the history of post-Enlightenment thought that made it impossible for modern men and women to believe. We have lost the intellectual debate about God and it has been lost for going on 400 years. That is a long time for the church to be on the back foot and long enough to so invade our thinking that it is very difficult indeed to see beyond it. This is not to say that we could return to a golden age of medieval theology - there was no golden age but there was some kind of theological coherence that unified culture. A reading of the church fathers reminds us how far we have travelled away from a coherent formulation of the faith before faith became a choice one made instead of an inherited place in a community of practice.

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What were the intellectual moves that made faith impossible for modern man? It is important to understand that these moves were made by people who believed in God, not by atheists. They came later in the Enlightenment history and founded the basis of their atheism on the mistaken theism of the early Enlightenment.

Modernity began with Descartes and his grounding of the certainty of existence on the thought of the individual. Clear and certain ideas could be obtained via this thought. The emphasis on certitude is the key. In the thought of John Locke, who was a defender of the faith, certainty was a moral imperative and it was thus immoral to make religious statements that were irrational. He was prompted to think thus by the excesses of the religious enthusiasts of his day who were fond of claiming as a revelation from God their own religious ideas, as so often still happens in or own day. While I sympathise with this thinking as regards undisciplined claims on the authority of God, it set up a false alternative between certain knowledge and faith. If we entertain beliefs that cannot be rationally upheld then we are morally corrupt and socially pernicious: we take the stand that "anything goes". Locke held that believers should be challenged to validate their beliefs according to a particular tradition of rationality. This assertion neglected the rationality of theologians which had guided theology from the beginning. Locke's move opened the way for a positivist critique of faith.

It did not take long for Continental philosophers like Diderot to use this critique to the devastation of belief. Many educated, especially scientifically educated, men and women in the West reside in this critique that makes even a step towards the church impossible. To acquiesce in any religious belief is to let down the side and demean oneself. If there is no valid reason for believing that God exists then to believe so is reprehensible and to open the way to antinomianism. It is ironic that the rationality that was thought to be a property of God became God's demise.

Part of our problem in this is that Christianity has been confused with a theism that is more the product of early Enlightenment thought in which God became and object in the universe. This identification broke the nexus between God and the tradition of scripture, liturgy, practice and thought that was a mark of the medieval church. God was perceived to be an immaterial entity that could nevertheless interact with the material world. Such a construction produced obvious problems with the theology of creation and was a sitting duck for a rationality that demanded validation. While fundamentalism strived to believe in such a god no matter what, liberalism let this god go but was left with trying to fulfil the assumed religious needs of humanity. Thus human subjectivity replaced God. It is obvious that both fundamentalism and liberalism are products of Enlightenment thought. This is why the present-day church must look beyond the 17thC to search out those rich traditions that bear witness to a reality that is not so easily disposed of by human reason and which informs and confronts our living.

If the church is to become an authentic voice in our time it must confront the false alternatives that have come down to us from the Enlightenment and write a theology that is faithful to the early church. This can be done in the face of our changed thought about mechanism in the world because God is not a part of that mechanism. Any god that is part of the world is world, and a god of the world is an idol. This conception is faithful to the creation narratives in that God is distinct from creation.

If modernity produced fundamentalism that is irrational and the liberal church that has nothing to say, post-modernity must produce the post-liberal church that finds its life in close contact with those rich texts and practices that produced the cultural coherence of the past. It is the loss of this coherence that lays waste our cities and our citizens.

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The process of secularisation has proceeded to the point that the church has now no voice in public life other than as the moral guardian beset by a sea of relative values. Again the irony; the quest for certainty has finally found its expression in the absence of all certainty.

Our media do not carry discussion about theology. Religious reportage treats its object as politically significant or as a set of unexamined beliefs privately and mysteriously held by individuals. This is the end result of the removal of theology from the public sphere to the private and this means that public debate is nonexistent. We empty debate by avowing that everyone has a right to believe what they like even if those beliefs are, as Locke would have it, the product of a "warmed or overweening brain". Debate is further attenuated out of the fear of sectarian strife. As a consequence the general public have no understanding of what Christianity is about and do not even know the difference between denominations and religions.

If the church has little voice in public life it has no voice in academia. Australian universities, with few exceptions, are marked by the almost systematic eradication of the theological stance. Because a basis of moral judgment or value is absent, our educational institutions are unable to articulate the purpose of education. When my university wants to make a defining statement about its purpose it produces unreadable documents that couch common sense in the terms of the language of managerialism. We have mission statements and strategic plans which are insulting to academics and form no connection with what actually goes on in the classroom. The vacuum of purpose is covered by such superlatives as "excellence" and "quality". This state of affairs has come about because we have lost any concept of what life is for let alone what education is for.

In biology the end of teleology was necessary before real science could begin. In public life or the life of the individual, its lack produces the impoverishment of materialism and hedonism. While the immediate progress of the natural sciences is little affected, the humanities are robbed of the rich source of biblical metaphor and social analysis lacks the theological perspectives that name secular idolatry. The humanities must limp along stripped of 2000 years of cultural development. It is no wonder that many courses show the shallowness that this produces.

To say with Aquinas that the purpose and end of life is to seek happiness, and that the greatest happiness is to see God, is impossible for a society that has done away with God but is content with its own deadly secular gods. To say with the American Declaration of Independence that the purpose of life is to seek happiness, period, is to fall into the same trap of knowing that our purpose resides only in ourselves. Cut off from a substantive theological tradition we cling to the faint hope of freedom and feel free to entertain any frivolous notion that comes into our heads. The only alternative is an ungrounded duty to help others and the discovery that even this is fraught with the dangers of ego for the helper and humiliation and dependency of those who are helped. This is because we lack the theological tradition that would tell us that the neighbour is promise and never duty.

How can the church reinstate the word "God" to mean the source of all of our hope? The atheist clings to the straw man of theism unwilling to leave the concept behind for fear that he might have to think again. The theist clings to the great parent in the sky and refuses to look upon the hazard and impermanence of human life. Both of these positions were born of Enlightenment thought. The task of reclamation and renewal is daunting because everyone seems to know with certainty the nature of the god they either adhere to or avow. But we must remember that religion in Israel was always troubled and the event of Jesus marked the end of our religious aspirations.

The task ahead for the church is, as it has always been, theological. Reformed management may bring short-term gains but the central problem the church faces is that it has forgotten its message and lives in a sea of relativities and the dominion of the subject. The way ahead is clear, good theology is being written. To name a few authors: Stanley Hauerwas, Michael Buckley, William Placher, George Lindbeck. These stand on the shoulders of giants and the giant of the 20thC must be Karl Barth.

There are no quick fixes for the plight of the church, only the hard work of winning the hearts and minds of a population inoculated against theological thought. Best we get on with it.

Key aspects of this article were inspired by Nicholas Wolterstorff "The Migration of the Theistic Arguments: From Natural Theology to Evidentialist Apologetics", in Rationality, Religious Belief, and Moral Commitment: New Essays in the Phylosophy of Religion, Ed Robert Audi and William Wainwright (Ithaca:Cornell University Press, 1986) and also by conversations with Canon Tom Sutton.

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About the Author

Peter Sellick an Anglican deacon working in Perth with a background in the biological sciences.

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